Re: <nettime> Interview with German Media Theorist Anna-Verena Nosthoff on Cybernetics and Criticism

[Gary Hall via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

'An organization needs to constantly reflect on itself to adapt to its 
environment and survive'

'we need to politicize narratives of cybernetics and adaptation'

Another not unproblematic thinker. But just as Boaventura de Sousa 
Santos argues in The End of the Cognitive Empire that we don't need 
another theory of resistance and revolution to place alongside all the 
others, ‘we need rather to revolutionize theory’, perhaps the challenge 
today is not to produce yet another philosophy of technology to add to 
those of Adorno, Habermas, Baudrillard, Stiegler et al., but to invent a 
new technology of philosophy.

Cheers, Gary


On 13/06/2026 12:00, Geert Lovink via nettime-l wrote:
> There’s an affective affinity between my internet criticism efforts and the work of German media theorist Anna-Verena Nosthoff, her partner Felix Maschewski, and their Berlin Critical Data Lab. After years in the making, Anna-Verena’s PhD (written in German) was published in early 2026 by Suhrkamp Verlag in their infamous stw series. Its release prompted the following email interview, in English, to introduce this majestic 660-page study that covers eight decades of theory on the “art of digital governance”. Her PhD degree at the University of Freiburg coincided with the birth of their son Bruno, and her appointment as junior professor at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg. Time to celebrate, discuss ideas, and steer next steps. Will there be a long-awaited renaissance of cybernetics, provoked by Europe’s ‘digital sovereignty’ wake-up call? Is there a need for a meta-theory that brings together digital media, networks, platforms, and AI? And how many of these ambitions are holding up in the face of techno-fascism?
>
> Feedback does not equal criticism. Time is necessary to process thoughts, reflect, and question the existing, then verbalize them in our minds before standing up to voice criticism. Critique starts with feedback, the central category of cybernetics. Yet, it is not the case that the other way around. The philosophical response to the rise of cybernetics as a general theory of computing in the late 1940s took some years but unfolded steadily in the following decade—the topic of the first part of Nosthoff’s thesis. After the initial speculative phase ended, cybernetics as a distinct discipline vanished precisely as the democratization of personal computing was taking off. Instead of establishing itself, cybernetics staged its own disappearance, to say it with Baudrillard. No meta-theory has since taken its place. What replaced the initial thinking of technical fundamentals was a desperate attempt to administer its impact. Techno-solutionism is still dominant. While the reductionism of operational thinking has been unmasked here and there, no overall alternatives are in place. Nosthoff’s German attempt (including mine) to reintroduce the ‘criticism’ category should be read as an attempt to uphold the lack of reflection and regain lost territory.
>
> The aim of Nosthoff is a “genealogical reconstruction of cybernetics criticism.” The study is divided into two periods: the first deals with the origins and first- and second-order cybernetics, always with a view to the role of criticism. In part two, we move from the mid-1980s toward Silicon Valley, the explosive growth of the Internet, and the dominance of digital technologies in the present day, when the research no longer revolves around reflections on ‘cybernetics’, but shifts towards a critique of cybernetization (even though this term is rarely used). This distinction is important because in the 1970s, cybernetics as a separate discipline slowly disappeared, precisely at the moment when its impact was truly beginning to materialize and unfold.
>
> Nosthoff describes the historical legacy of cybernetics as a non-disciplinary meta-approach. Neither a method nor a school, cybernetics refused to establish itself as a universal science. In the end, it was unable (or unwilling?) to assert itself. During the post-war decades, criticism still had an object to relate to in the form of books, journals, conferences, and meetings, when cybernetics was still reasonably well embedded in the academic milieu; this was no longer the case later on. From the moment computers became ‘personal,’ the only thing critics could deal with was the impact, a force so strong and omnipresent that it disguised its original principles (and the earlier debates about its premises). In the phase after the mid-1970s, cybernetics criticism lost its object and was forced to reorient itself. It is remarkable that there is no clear transition phase—with the exception of the Stafford Beer/Chilean Cybersyn episode in the early 1970s, so brilliantly brought back to life in Eugene Morozov’s podcast series.
>
> Since the sweet revenge. How can today’s digital regime be fundamentally criticized when its founding discipline disappeared fifty years ago? Should its withdrawal be read as a genius act or even a conspiracy? Regardless, the institutional poverty re: tech is planetary in scope, with the powerless ‘AI ethics’ funding wave as a recent example. The digital behemoth cannot be allocated. As venture capital is the financial motor driving exponential hyper-growth, it is a mystery how Big Tech creates monopolies overnight that become both invisible and untouchable when venture capital is left out of the equation.
>
> The back cover quote of Nosthoff’s book is crisp and clear: “Cybernetics is everywhere, like air.” The goal of critical theory is then to make this invisible ubiquity of the digital visible again. The crisis the Trump 2 administration has thrown the European liberal establishment into will be a test case if this challenge is taken up, yes or no. Despite calls for ‘digital sovereignty’, the dominant regressive conservatism is neither pointing in the direction of critique nor that of alternatives. Understanding stagnation is what’s on the agenda. This means we need to add this new insight to the definition: cybernetics as the science of communication, control, and stabilization in complex systems. Entropy is not just a warning for a possible collapse; it should be seen as a key part of the cybernetic process.
>
> Nosthoff is critical of Baudrillard’s cynical attitude, yet keeps coming back to him. This is interesting because Baudrillard cannot be called a critic of cybernetics. Nonetheless, she brings his basic motif of disappearance into play (also present in Paul Virilio’s work). She convincingly links these two Parisians with Günther Anders’ concept of antiquity. The thesis is that notions such as cybernetic feedback loops only intervene deeply in the hardware, software, and everyday lives of billions of users after their disappearance. This is where the decisive effect of cybernetic principles—including their criticism—lies. According to Anders, humans are beings who must always first appropriate their world technically. The task is then, in the words of Günther Anders, “to uncover the fact of concealment itself.” This is the project of the present critique of ‘cybernetization’—and the core of this large-scale study.
>
> Nosthoff’s goal is neither to save nor to reconstruct cybernetics. She is concerned with accurately describing the effects of power. This might be why she did not call for the establishment of ‘Cybernetics 2.0’, as Geneviève Bell did in 2021 when she founded the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University. A few weeks before his untimely death in August 2020, French philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler made a similar call for an informatique théorique (a new theory of computer science). Landed in Rotterdam, Yuk Hui is working in the same direction. However, the work done here could certainly be read as the historical and contemporary basis for such an institute. So far, most of the research conducted in Berlin has been in journalism, law, and the social sciences. Digital theory and criticism from a humanities perspective remains small. Her ambitions are clearly different from the slow bureaucratic politics that solely aim at regulation after the fact. It is in this void that her “art of digital governance” can come into play. That’s the visionary note: without a set of critical notions, Nosthoff will not issue any control instructions. No control without critique. Prisms need to be built into the design of information systems from the start. This is the right moment to switch to the interview.
>
> GL: Tell me if I am wrong, but I got a strong sense that your work embodies a strong will to continue and update the work of Günther Anders. He’s perhaps not so well known in the Anglo world, but still respected in philosophy-of-technology circles. Where do you situate the beginnings of this phenomenal work that you’ve delivered?
>
> AVN: Philosophically, I am indebted to Anders’ work in many respects. Fortunately, the long-awaited English translation of Anders’s magnum opus, The Obsolescence of Man, has just been published by the University of Minnesota Press, thanks to the brilliant efforts of the translators and Anders scholars Chris Müller and Christian Dries. I hope there’s growing interest in Anders’s work, and I am positive that interest will only grow given the increased availability of his work in English. Anders’s thinking seems almost uncannily timely, which, in my opinion, has to do with his philosophical method of exaggeration, combined with critical anticipation. Together with Felix, I have interpreted this method as the intention to think through the totalitarian potentials and tendencies of cybernetic technologies, and prolong their potentially destructive tendencies into the future; Anders therefore referred to himself as a “vorwärts gekehrte Historiker”; an inverted historicist. We once wrote an article about this aspect and Anders’s contemporary relevance for Thesis Eleven.
>
> Reading Anders today, I see many observations he already made at the beginning of the process of cybernetisation regarding the non-neutrality of technologies when they are no longer conceived as mere means. Or those regarding the difficulty that moral problems are often posed, and discussed only after the (technological) fact, i.e., when a technological normalization and standardization process has already, as it were, colonized the life worlds of subjects, to borrow Habermas’s expression. Anders is probably best known for his concept of “Promethean shame”, by which he means the chasm between the perfect machine and the subject who feels ashamed when confronted with it because of his or her felt or alleged limitations. I could never really make much sense of this concept until Chat GPT was introduced, as I have the strong intuition, and I can confirm this from conversations I have with students, that many of them, especially at the beginning of their studies, feel they lack the ability to meet the level of (alleged) perfection when they compare their own writing with a chatbot’s generative content. Reversing this feeling of Promethean shame is central to teaching in the age of Large Language Models.
>
> My work is inspired by Anders’ positions. His oeuvre continues to challenge us, as subjects living in a digital age. Even more, it now confronts us in an age that is pervaded by so-called “genAI,” where several of its concepts are easily attributable to phenomena that, in such concretion, it was unable to really anticipate. That’s precisely why, in retrospect, I would say it lends much credence to Anders’s philosophical method.
>
> GL: Another unknown critic of cybernetics is the German philosopher Hans Jonas. His article “Critique of Cybernetics” is from 1953. You compare his piece with Margaret Mead’s later remarks. Can you explain what these early reflections on this emerging philosophy of computing were about?
>
> AVN: It was fascinating to me to reread Jonas’s early critique of cybernetics. And a coincidence that I read it roughly at the same time as I read several early writings that emerged at the beginning of second-order cybernetics, Mead’s (and later on Heinz von Foerster’s) writings as central pieces. Of particular importance to me were Mead’s remarks made before the term “second-order cybernetics” was coined by Heinz von Foerster. It is important to explain Mead’s theses first before highlighting the centrality of Jonas’s earlier critique: Mead argues that cybernetics needs to self-transform to develop. This was at a time when cybernetics faced an existential crisis. First, cybernetics had become so broad a term that it was unclear what it actually meant, making the prior “glamour field” seem rather vague. Second, cybernetics entered a moment of legitimation crisis in the West as soon as it became relevant to real-existing socialist contexts, especially the GDR and the USSR. Mead made this claim during a conference hosted by the Society for General Systems Theory, which was close to cybernetics. An organization needs to constantly reflect on itself to adapt to its environment and survive, and she reiterated this proposition in the context of the Conference Proceedings of a Symposium of the American Society for Cybernetics. This is where the second-order perspective is taking shape, and Heinz von Foerster then edits the text and coins the term “second-order cybernetics” to describe the cybernetisation of cybernetics. Von Foerster then later claimed that he came to understand that the problem with first-order-cybernetics was that it, for instance––thinking of the external observer perspective in which the mind was described in the sense of neural nets, think of McCulloch and Pitts, for instance, or Ashby’s homeostat––that first order cybernetics essentially could not come up with a way to account for its own descriptions: How can a thinking subject explain the processes of thinking when it is thinking? This is where von Foerster identifies first-order cybernetics as a blind spot and proposes recursivity.
>
> What’s fascinating is that Jonas makes similar statements when he criticizes first-order cybernetics in his early critique. Absurdly enough, he does not only describe the context in which a group of cyberneticists at a conference of cybernetics were to describe itself––i.e., the context in which second-order-cybernetics would then effectively emerge from many years later––but more importantly, he criticizes that cybernetics is unable to account for itself, since if the human mind, for instance, were practically reducible to binary digits and neural signal transmission the cybernetician was unable to account for how he can even reach that explanation in thinking. I did some archival work to find out whether Jonas’s text might have been read by cyberneticists at the time, given the obvious similarities. Bertalanffy was, interestingly enough, in contact with Jonas, and he was also an important figure in the emergence of second-order cybernetics. But I could not prove that Jonas’s text was actually read by the key figures of cybernetics.
>
> It remains interesting that it took first-order cybernetics so long to respond to a quite similar critique. Or rather, to develop it itself. This has a lot to do with a general affect against philosophical investigation and critique. This affect is very visible in early cybernetics––although cybernetics claimed to be interdisciplinary and a new, open field, it was almost stubborn when it came to philosophical accounts that, for instance, questioned their techniques of analogization between human and machinic behaviour, or between the workings of the mind and the brain; or the way in which they came to ascribe intentionality to both humans and machines, or how they used systemic and abstract terminology to describe social, technical, or biological systems, thus erasing all (material) differences among them. Instead of engaging with such critiques, cybernetics simply ignored them or deemed them irrelevant.
>
> GL: Your approach is author-centrist. In your study, the critique of systems is not voiced by engineers, users, programmers, activists, artists, or entrepreneurs for that matter, but by philosophers. How did they come to this knowledge? This is a sincere question. If we follow Stafford Beer’s “purpose of a system is what it does” and map these “doings” in the light of (self) organization and bottom-up planning, how relevant is it to reflect on the system as a whole? The Gen Z-driven Hegel memes indicate a need to go for the whole, a techno-totality. Is the choice between detailed case studies and big ideas a false one?
>
> AVN: What’s of great importance is the dialectical method that takes into account the interrelations and contradictions between the whole and the part, the abstract and the particular. It’s always a challenge to find this position between closeness to the phenomenon and the distance of the Begriff, Adorno would say, Begriff und Sache, without operating in violent abstractions. In Beer’s maxim, I see the problem that systems that center solely on operability and self-reproduction lose sight of any purpose, that’s their apoliticality, which I find deeply problematic, as it is easily instrumentalized politically. That’s close to the circularity we have around generative AI and the ideology of total scalability, rather than using a particular dataset to train a particular model for a democratic end. Ironically, in the context of Cybersyn, Beer kept track of both––mostly at least––he rarely lost sight of the political purpose of what he tried to accomplish there, using cybernetics. That’s where I still see the potential of his approach.
>
> Regarding my work and the way it reads philosophical positions, this is why I focused so much on authors: I did not ascribe to a concrete philosophical viewpoint, as I did not want to hypostatize. That is also why I chose a genealogical method, both to describe and understand the development of cybernetics, and the development of critiques of cybernetics–– and the intertwinements between both. I do reflect on the normative critiques made at the time, and uttered, for instance, against the new terminology of systems that, as Habermas and Wolf-Dieter Narr argued, was too abstract and too far removed from social phenomena to account for. As they argued, the language was completely detached from political processes or from political questions concerning inequality, participation, and resistance. Importantly, some of these critiques emerged at a time when cybernetics and its central premises were still subject to debate. This was at a time when there was a distance between cybernetics and its critics; between the phenomenon in question and the critical theories that discussed it; between, as it were, the object and the subject, more broadly.
>
> The landscape changed with the advent of cybernetic capitalism and the personal computer, when control tools seemed to have been ‘decentralized’ and dismantled from the technocratic control of the state. Critics, all of a sudden, seemed to be somewhat part of, or in the midst of, what they criticized. And that was very consciously reflected upon, as a central dilemma that provoked the question of where and how to find a place from where to observe critically, and find a distance to the object, by each of the theorists I engaged with, from Anders to Habermas to Baudrillard and Tiqqun––as is well known, Deleuze and Guattari borrowed the term “plane” from Bateson, which shows how they integrated cybernetic thinking whilst at the same time attempting to transcend its circularity. Each critic found a different answer. Anders formulated a philosophy of critical exaggeration in the context of his idea of a moral phantasy (moralische Phantasie). Habermas sought to limit the systemic-technological colonization of the lifeworld through communicative reasoning. Baudrillard used the figure of the Möbius strip to describe the clashing of binaries in the course of what could be termed a digital binarization in the midst of his somewhat ironic, provocative mode of critique. And Tiqqun utilized strategic tactics of anti-net resistance, as it were–forms of noise production, interruptions. The external observer problem, as problematic by both second-order cybernetics and poststructuralism, is not easily attainable nowadays. But this does not mean we have to throw a critically self-reflective (not self-circular!) objectivity or a process of critical enlightenment (in Foucault’s sense of interrupting the hegemonic forms of being-governed) away, as Heinz von Foerster at points seemingly does, who to my account throws away conceptuality as such for some lose account of “cybernethics”, as he terms it, which, however, appears random to me at points.
>
> When Adorno claims that there is objectivity in suffering and that this is the condition of all truth, this focus can attain and preserve a particular form of ethical objectivity that can survive the clash of the subject-object distinction. My problem with second-order cybernetics is that it starts from the system and returns to it in a recursive, not reflective, form. The system comes first, always–– whereas in an ethics of alterity perspective, what is named the Other, the Third, or the “Nichtidentische”, with Adorno (who, to my account, shares some affinities with an ethics of alterity), plays an entirely different role. This is where ethics starts: precisely from some place that transcends the system, from some Other that remains unknowable. Cybernetic and post-structuralism are therefore, to my account, very distinct from each other, also with regard to their thinking of futurity.
>
> GL: Cybernetics, as the art of controlling the context, failed. Overload is systemic. As Stiegler warns, the danger of entropy is imminent. Can we still ‘steer’ and adapt to these new circumstances?
>
> AVN: What we currently observe is close to your argument that we are approaching the extinction internet moment, where networks, the internet as such, and ‘smart’ systems are simply not working anymore, where they produce their moments of “enshittification”, bullshit or slop, where they reproduce racism, systemically, and operate on steroids, where they reproduce and intensify an overload of extraction. AI hallucinations and Elon Musk’s recent construction of 35 illegal gas turbines in Memphis to power his xAI are the most obvious examples of the system’s irrationality. We’re approaching a tipping point, not just with regard to the climate catastrophe but also with regard to the evolution of the internet. Both these dynamics intersect.
>
> Regarding the history of cybernetics, adaptation narratives began to change when the term was no longer solely associated with stabilization, as it was in the early days of the Cold War, as its Greek origin “kybernetes” suggests (meaning “steersman”). Although back then it was, of course, also connected to entropy and moments of crisis, it was always concerned with creating order from noise and diminishing chaos. Yet, during the dotcom bubble and the early instabilities of the new economy, it became clear that cybernetics was not necessarily a technique of stabilization but rather produced its own instabilities; this is why Virilio spoke of “integral accidents”. This moment coincides with the becoming hegemonic of the second-order paradigm, as well as with the advent of complexity, chaos, and systems theory.
>
> What we face is a series of attempts to solve ongoing politico-economic crises with adaptation techniques. These, however, not only provoke further problems of adaptation (think of climate engineering “techno-fix” strategies) but also reproduce the systemic status quo without really addressing the causes of systemic injustices, inequalities, etc. Technology in this context is never a solution to a problem; it is always a (cheap, and only supposed) solution and a problem. The question then, if we take seriously the fact that solutionism is manufacturing problems, is how to find a better way to address the adaptation and steering problems of the present. The response here should be to not frame political problems as adaptation problems: we have, for a long time, made this mistake. Take nudging, which was prevalent in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Nudging is a neo-cybernetic technique of governing and adapting that ignores the systemic causes of the crises we have faced and still face today, positing the illusion of a post-ideological world. It is no coincidence that nudging was widely used in smart city initiatives, in which citizens were sold “smartness” and related concepts. Instead, we need to politicize narratives of cybernetics and adaptation. Cybernetics is connected to a post-political illusion, one that describes or creates systems in such a way that they are–– allegedly–– technological alternatives to politics. But the problem lies precisely in the depoliticization of adaptation.
>
> GL: I am glad you ‘limited’ your study to the role of critique in the overall roll-out of ‘cybernetization’ of society. This is arguably only one side of the story. The other is the split in 1955 and the separation between the feedback-networking side and the artificial intelligence direction, led by Minsky and others. You did very well in keeping the ‘knowledge’ part of machine learning out of your investigations. Given the current hype around large language models and AI, how do you defend your choice? How do you relate to the current AI onslaught?
>
> AVN: There is a connection between the different traditions and lineages of cybernetics and cybernetisation and what is currently termed AI or generative AI. First, Wiener’s work in the context of the so-called Anti-Aircraft-Predictor develops an early form of predictive analytics on the grounds of anticipations of the future that are based on the collection of past data on behavior, in his context, regarding the directions of enemy aircraft. This technique remains relevant for LLMs that rely on probabilistic assessments and stochastic methods. Also, we should not forget that McCulloch and Pitts developed the first neural net at the beginning of the 1940s, with the aim of simulating the brain’s behavior; similar to Ashby’s construction of the homeostat, a model of a living brain. There is a link between early cybernetics’ accounts of the brain-computer-nexus and notions of AGI–so I was not at all surprised, for instance, when Marc Andreessen, the right-wing-libertarian author of the now infamous “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” quotes McCulloch and Pitts’s seminal text from 1943 to claim that the “revolution” of AGI builds on McCulloch’s and Pitts’s proposition. This is entirely superficial, but I still think it is interesting that he refers to them. What Andreessen means here is: In the early forties, the idea was to imitate the human brain, and we have forgotten that, later on, with narrow AI and now with projects aiming for AGI, superintelligence, etc. We are back to building that. Is it a coincidence that Anthropic’s Claude is named after Claude Shannon? The Shannon, whose mathematical information theory was instrumental to cybernetics, especially to Wiener’s and Deutsch’s work? I don’t think so.
>
> GL: The last part of your study describes the past ‘internet’ decades, defined by omnipresent connectivity, wearables, and platforms. One element I would like to take out here is ‘the social’. You discuss Alex Pentland’s Social Physics and Tiqqun’s Cybernetic Hypothesis. The way algorithms work on social media is how billions experience the feedback mechanism today. It is hard to imagine how social relations in the near future will not be shaped by code. How do you envision ‘the social’ as part of a form of governance that is transparent and not extractive?
>
> AVN: I would probably not call it transparent in the first place. Rather, we have to think of the social beyond social media, and beyond mere connectivity, and what we would need, among other things, is a different imaginary based on a different terminology. I always felt close to an ethics of alterity, in a Derridean, maybe also Levinasian sense. Levinas thinks responsibility in the sense of being able to respond. It is a response to a demand placed on me by the Other, and this demand is asymmetrical: it places the Other first, which is important, as it goes far beyond a mere network-based approach to (supposed) decentrality and horizontality. Response-ability understood in this sense can never be reduced to feedback. Yet, it is equally important not to stop here. For Levinas, the ethical relationleads to politics through the inevitable integration of a “Third”. The political, understood in this sense, is a disruption of the ethical relation, but it is necessary to offer the possibility for justice in being; in that sense, it is also related to the inevitably political tasks of organization and conceptualization.
> The question for me would be of how to think through a response-able politics in this sense, for the current age in which the social as a category is corroded, hollowed out, by the bad sociality and the schlechte Unendlichkeit of social media. Such a response-able politics can be close to your (and Ned Rossiter’s) approach to “organized networks”: creating relations that are not reducible to mere connectivity, giving subjects the space to evolve beyond being reduced to nodes in a network. Next to the pragmatic question of organization (and politics, for that matter), we have to pay equal attention to the question of relationality and sociality: Is there a way to reimagine how we relate to each other that goes beyond connectivity?
>
> GL: According to Chris Anderson, the plenitude of data provokes the “end of theory”. From now on, the program is the theory. Together with Felix and others, you are running the Critical Data Lab. How do you see data in relation to theory? Should philosophers indeed know more than just prompting and have classic programming skills? How do you envision a critical tech education? German institutions are notoriously conservative and behind in this respect. Should philosophy still be taught the way Adorno and Arendt once gave their seminars? What are your early experiences in Oldenburg in this respect?
>
> AWN: Tech critique today needs to pay close attention to the developments regarding tech-fascism. This should be the first task, and these issues are also at the heart of the seminars I am teaching, often together with Felix. What we try to make clear is that we need to investigate the manifold forms of power involved in techno-authoritarianism–from communicative power (think of Musk’s propaganda on X), to geopolitical power (such as Musk’s usage of Starlink in the context of the Ukrainian war), and financial power (to point to the obvious). Next is to come up with multiple ways of resisting these forms of power. I am sympathetic to the now-emerging AI refusal movements around the globe and to the revival of critique in the Luddite tradition (which I do not view as a refusal of tech tout court, though). It is important that we give the protesters currently protesting the construction of new data centers a voice, and that we also address our media coverage of their tactics. I would like to point here to Karen Hao’s list of organizations and movements. Take the Cables of Resistance Conference in Berlin. It is important to understand that a whole new movement that politicizes tech critically is currently underway.
>
> It is equally important that we correct the misconception that digitization is an immaterial process by examining the materialities of the digital. Many current forms of so-called AI are regressive, not progressive; ineffective, not effective; centralizing, not decentralizing; closing, not opening. On that note, responding to these powers requires different forms of critique: deconstructionist techniques, ideological critique, and discourse analysis can help unravel the tactics and strategies of Big Tech actors, for instance. But methods from computational social sciences can help here as well, for instance, in identifying new ideological narratives in the context of communities such as Effective Altruism and the TESCREAL bundle. Regarding EA, narratives about AI have, for instance, shifted to “superintelligence” narratives around the time Bostrom’s book of the same name was published a few years ago, prompting EA to shift to longtermism, as Carolin Müller (from ZeMKI in Bremen) recently argued. Several of these narrative nuances have shaped AI regulations, so it is vital to understand which discursive dynamics are at play. So, yes, (critical) data can also play a role in informing critique, I would say, also with regard to making things visible–think of projects such as Data in Feminicide in this respect. I think here we need to be creative in developing new methods as well.
>
> I am fortunate in Oldenburg to be teaching bright, excellent students who are well-read in Kant, Hegel, and Marx, as well as in post-structuralism. Many of them are deeply concerned about contemporary developments regarding the rise of techno-authoritarianism. They are engaged and open to critical thinking through contemporary phenomena surrounding the digital condition together. Many of my seminars are very experimental; recently, I used a very open format, which I co-taught with my colleague Tilman Hannemann, a scholar of religious studies, to examine the religious aspects of techno-fascism. We invited Carolin Müller, who conducts ethnographic research in EA circles, to present her work. The idea for the seminar emerged from the shared conviction that we can learn from each other’s perspectives and use trans-disciplinary approaches and methods to better understand the complexities of particular phenomena.
>
> GL: An element of future theory could be the regression of cybernetics up to the point where civic computing collapses and returns to its military origins. Back to Friedrich Kittler? You use the term ‘authoritarian cybernetics’ for this. Do you see a need to move on from all the platform blues and address the more urgent issues of our time, like ‘antifa’ resistance against AfD and the militarization of society after the Ukraine invasion by Russia? In my recent work, I have pointed out the violent turn in internet culture. Is the subtle term ‘governmentality’ still appropriate in such a dire situation? Can we still state that power has disappeared into invisible infrastructures? All these contradictory developments seem to accelerate and collide at the same time.
>
> AVN: I am afraid we are already advancing well into this stage. To my account, it is no coincidence that Palantir is openly speaking of the new era of deterrence, whereas this new deterrence will be, as Alex Karp is very explicit about in his propaganda, AI-based. Several of the major themes of first-order cybernetics recur currently with regard to AI weapons systems: predicting the future to anticipate the enemy’s moves, etc. In a promotional video, Palantir recently proclaimed that they help address the challenge of “navigating the fog of war,” which directly alludes to the navigability metaphor central to cybernetic and neo-cybernetic steering techniques. The centrality of cybernetics becomes visible, too, when Musk currently draws on cybernetics implicitly when he speaks of “cyber-powers” in relation to his company Neuralink and the improvement of brain-computer interfaces, when he dubs people as “always already cyborgs”, or when he speaks of X as a “cybernetic collective superintelligence”.
>
> Equally, Zuckerberg speaks of companies as “learning systems”––which is a central figure of second-order cybernetics––while Andreessen directly alludes to cybernetics in his Techno-Optimist-Manifesto. This is not mere rhetoric and is not only reflective of the influence cybernetics has had on the counterculture that then shaped cyberculture, which, in turn, shaped Silicon Valley. To my mind, there is more to that; in fact, I do think that we are witnessing the reemergence of central motifs that were prevalent, especially in first-order cybernetics. Although we also witness a fusion of both forms of cybernetics, I would say: Think of the way in which Musk uses X, of course, He uses it as a quite centralized form of propaganda, in a sense, but this form of propaganda is still using feedback, also horizontal feedback, for messages and content to spread. So centralized modes of steering and governing are more prevalent in current forms of cybernetics, but modes of circularity and self-recursion remain part of the whole picture. In my account, this fusion of centralized and decentralized forms of control is central to cybernetic authoritarianism.
>
> GL: You may know Made in China, Designed in California, Criticized in Europe. How do you respond to this tragic role of Europe that has reduced its role to the legal work of the world’s tech regulator? These days, Berlin is not exactly perceived as the global capital of free thinking. Is Europe tired and provincial? How can we envision a vital culture of criticism that is not bitter and does not arrive a decade too late with remarks on the side? Is Germany still the right place to develop a philosophy of technology for the 21st century?
>
> AVN: A philosophy of technology for the 21st century would most certainly have to involve the perspectives of those who are mostly affected by the negative impact of current digital systems. This is a perspective that I am trying to hint at as well at the end of my book: That we need to make visible what is usually hidden from view with regard to cybernetic capitalism, and that includes of course the exploitative labor that is the basis of current AI systems, and the ecological costs of LLMs, for instance, including the communities that are mostly affected by them.
>
> We won’t solve these structural issues with ethics committees. You are right to point out that our legal systems are simply not fast enough or well-equipped enough to adequately regulate these technologies. A ban on big tech lobbying might be worth considering as an additional measure in this context, given the extent of lobbying efforts in recent years and their influence on AI regulations. We have to come up with ways to democratize these systems from the ground up, a way of democratization that includes the full stack. Your concept of stacktivism is to the point here, and I am also thinking of people who have recently worked on the Euro Stack framework. One task is also to bring together the various groups currently mobilizing against AI. If we come up with ways to democratically govern these technologies, the question of regulation is less relevant–logically, as these systems would be designed democratically, from the ground up. It is important to emphasize that these democratic structures already exist, think of the Fediverse. Not all here is optimal, but this can serve as a basis for the course. Yet, to arrive at a more democratic digital society, we also need to cultivate a different sociotechnical imaginary when using and speaking about these technologies.
>
> —
>
> Interview with links: https://networkcultures.org/geert/2026/06/13/interview-with-anna-verena-nosthoff/.
> Info on her German book: https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/anna-verena-nosthoff-kybernetik-und-kritik-t-9783518300794.
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